“Not quite,” Fuchs said. Turning to Jiminez, he asked, “Do you recognize any of these men?”
The youngster looked frightened. He shook his head. “They were wearing breathing masks, like I told you. And funny kind of hats.”
“This one, maybe?” Fuchs prodded the shoulder of the man he had shot.
“I don’t know!” Jiminez whined.
Fuchs took a deep breath. “All right. Take the tractors back to our warehouse.”
Jiminez dashed out into the tunnel, plainly glad to get away.
“You think you’re going to get away with this?” the wounded man growled. “We’re gonna break you into little pieces for this. We’ll make you watch while we bang your wife. We’re gonna make her—”
Fuchs wheeled on him and kicked him in the face, knocking him onto his back. The others scuttled away. Nodon shouted, “Don’t move!” and leveled his laser at them.
Frenzied with rage, Fuchs rushed to one of the storage bins lining the wall and yanked out a length of copper wire. Tucking his laser back into its belt pouch, he wrapped one end of the wire several times around the groaning, half-conscious man’s neck, then dragged him toward the high stacks of shelving, coughing and sputtering blood from his broken teeth.
The others watched, wide-eyed, while Fuchs knotted the wire at the man’s throat, then tossed the other end of it around one of the slim steel beams supporting the shelving. He yanked hard on the wire and the wounded man shot up into the air, eyes bulging, both hands struggling to untie the wire cutting into his neck. He weighed only a few kilos in Ceres’s light gravity, but that was enough to slowly squeeze his larynx and cut off his air.
Blazing with ferocity, Fuchs whirled on the other HSS men, who sat in the dust staring at their leader thrashing, choking, his legs kicking, a strangled gargling inhuman sound coming from his bleeding mouth.
“Watch!” Fuchs roared at them. “Watch! This is what happens to any man who threatens my wife. If any of you even looks at my wife I’ll tear your guts out with my bare hands!”
The hanging man’s struggles weakened. He lost control of his bladder and bowels in a single burst of stench. Then his arms fell to his sides and he became still. The men on the floor stared, unmoving, openmouthed. Even Nodon watched in terrible fascination.
“Come,” Fuchs said at last. “We’re finished here.”
CHAPTER 41
Diane Verwoerd was in bed with Dorik Harbin when her phone buzzed and the wallscreen began blinking with priority message in bright yellow letters.
She disentangled herself from him and sat up. “It’s almost two,” he grumbled. “Aren’t you ever off-duty?”
But Diane was already staring at the frightened face of her caller and listening to his breathless, almost incoherent words. Then the screen showed a man hanging by the neck, eyes bulging, tongue protruding from his mouth like an obscene wad of flesh. “Great god,” said Harbin.
Verwoerd slipped out of bed and began to get dressed. “I’ll have to tell Martin about this personally. This isn’t the kind of news you relay by phone.”
She found Humphries still awake and alone in the big mansion’s game room.
“We have troubles,” she said as she entered the room. He was bent over the pool table, cue in hand. Humphries had spent many long hours learning how to shoot pool on the Moon. The one-sixth gravity only subtly affected the way the balls rolled or caromed. A visitor could play a few rounds and think nothing was different from Earth. That’s when Humphries would offer a friendly wager on the next game.
“Troubles?” he said, intent on his shot. He made it; the balls clicked and one of the colored ones rolled to a corner pocket and dropped neatly in. Only then did Humphries straighten up and ask, “What troubles?”
“Fuchs raided the warehouse and killed one of the men there. Hanged him.”
Humphries’s eyes widened. “Hanged him? By the neck?”
“The others have quit,” Verwoerd went on. “They want no part of this fight.”
He snorted disdainfully. “Cowardly little shits.”
“They were hired to bully people. They never thought that Fuchs would fight back. Not like this.”